Pluggable founder Bernie Thompson explains why docking stations keep evolving: laptops lose ports, but workflows still demand power delivery, fast I/O, wired networking, and stable external displays over a single cable. The 2026 flagship Thunderbolt 5 dock is framed as a response to real connector habits—more USB-C, higher-wattage charging, and native display outputs people actually use in daily desk setups. https://plugable.com/products/tbt-udh2
In this booth chat from CES Las Vegas 2026, the dock’s layout is shown from the back: 180W input, up to 140W host charging, multiple USB-C data+power ports, dual HDMI, and Ethernet. Thunderbolt 5’s 80Gbps baseline with 120Gbps Bandwidth Boost lets a dock target high-refresh multi-monitor modes (for example dual 4K at 144Hz-class loads, with 8K modes depending on host and display). Pluggable also leans into a fanless mechanical design, plus 2.5GbE and UHS-II SD/microSD for media ingest here.
The technical subtext is that “one port to everything” only works when link negotiation is solid: TB5/USB4 tunneling, cable quality, monitor EDID behavior, and OS-specific display limits can all bite. Pluggable’s compatibility-first approach is about taming those edge cases, so storage, capture devices, and high-speed peripherals behave predictably across Windows and macOS with care.
The second demo uses Thunderbolt as external PCIe: a TB enclosure that hosts a desktop-class GPU, framed less as an eGPU gaming box and more as an AI inference engine. For local LLMs, the bottleneck is often VRAM and privacy, not peak frame rate—so a higher-memory card can load models quickly, generate tokens locally, and keep prompts and documents off the cloud. They also mention an in-house Plugable Chat app (Apache 2.0) built to run “chat with your data” workflows, including RAG over internal document stores inside.
Taken together, it’s a snapshot of docks turning into workstation front-ends: power, displays, Ethernet, removable media, and now desk-side AI acceleration over the same Thunderbolt fabric. If you’re building a dependable laptop-to-desk setup, the practical advice is to budget power, validate monitor modes (refresh matters as much as resolution), and treat cables as part of the system, not an afterthought today.
I’m publishing about 100+ videos from CES 2026, I upload about 4 videos per day at 5AM/11AM/5PM/11PM CET/EST. Check out all my CES 2026 videos in my playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7xXqJFxvYvjaMwKMgLb6ja_yZuano19e
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